One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

by Christopher Brookmyre

  Simone walked back inside the suite to the bathroom, where she turned on the shower and stripped off her clothes. She looked at the black dress hanging up against the wall, then with satisfaction at her taut, flat stomach and lithe, slim thighs. Several hours in the gym every day, while the girls were at nursery school. Gavin hadn’t been the only one doing plenty of preparing for this party. Couldn’t do much about the boobs, right enough, apart from firm things up a bit, but then that’s what she’d brought the wonderbra for.

  She had decided it wouldn’t be enough merely to leave him, even in front of all those people and in his moment of triumph. She wanted him, and everyone he’d been so keen to assemble there, to see exactly who was leaving him: the smartest, brightest, sexiest woman in the room.

  Simone Draper.

  16:18 rosstown nick cromarty’s most wanted

  McGregor wasn’t enjoying his retirement much any more. He sat in the interview room, arms folded, malevolently eyeing a lukewarm polystyrene cup of watery tea, his simmering gaze occasionally straying to PC Carrot-Cruncher on the other side of the desk. Carrot-Cruncher didn’t seem very comfortable either, nervously glancing at the door every few seconds as he impatiently awaited his superior, Sergeant Mutton-Molester, who was presumably about to bring his unique teuchter policing genius to bear upon this perplexing matter. The juvenile-looking cop flinched every time McGregor shifted in his chair, seemingly terrified of becoming the Beast of Kilbokie’s next mutilated victim. At one point McGregor had coughed and the skinny drink of water involuntarily slid his chair back from the table. It was hard to tell whether the accompanying shriek came from the chair legs or the post-pubescent polisman.

  The irony was coming out his arse. His first official civilian day in close on four decades and here he was on the wrong side of the interview table, faced with a far-from-inspiring representative of the future of the force. He was beginning to appreciate a certain twisted plausibility to the Pink Panther films, understanding vividly how Chief Inspector Dreyfus could progress from respected senior police official to misanthropic arch-criminal. It didn’t take a Clouseau; it just took a day like this.

  He had come round lying on his side in some long grass, his head throbbing with a sharp, insistent pain, his mouth raspingly dry. His first thought was a nagging worry that he couldn’t even remember whose stag night it had been. Then he was disturbed to find that he could open only one side of his mouth, and feared that this was due to a facial palsy resultant of the stroke that must have scythed him down suddenly during his morning stroll. An exploratory hand reached gently to his lips and discovered that the restriction was in fact caused by a large quantity of dried blood that had oozed from his nostrils and pooled on one side of his face. He picked at it with his fingernails to loosen its edges, then peeled the clotted mass off like a giant scab. It was almost a shame to throw it away: he had a young nephew who would have enormously appreciated it, and the look on his sister-in-law’s face would have been a picture too.

  Sitting up, he felt the damp weight of his shirt tug upon his chest, and started a little when he saw that it was coated down one side in drying but still-sticky blood. He pulled rashly at the buttons, sending several of them popping off into the grass as he ripped open the garment and examined the skin beneath, his right hand patting down the area in frantic alarm. To his relief there was no injury, no wound, and not even any pain. He rested his hand back upon the grass at his side, then suddenly sprang three feet sideways like a startled crab, having felt foreign fingers beneath his own. Looking down, he saw that there was a messily detached human arm lying beside him, scorch-marks on the skin near the end where such appendages normally connected to their owner.

  McGregor climbed tremulously to his feet, memories of a loud bang beginning to form in his aching head. Recovering from an initial wave of dizziness, he commenced the hangover walk, cushioning each footfall against shaking his agitated brain. After a few tender yards, he reached the edge of a clearing and could see two outbuildings downhill from where he stood. The building on the left was missing the best part of one wall, and there were bricks scattered in a wide arc around it. Cows stood nearby looking uniformly unimpressed; presumably they’d all seen much better explosions, tons of times.

  He picked his way delicately back to the spot where he’d come to, and lifted up the arm. The unexpected weight of the thing caused him to wince, and the very thought of it seemed to make his skull ache all the more. It was a hell of a thing to get hit with. He took a deep breath, steeling himself for the walk ahead and the unenviable task of finding whatever else might remain of the redundant limb’s former employer among the rubble.

  His eyes were fixed upon the site of the explosion as he trudged woozily down the hill. Going by the state of the building and the distance the arm had travelled, it was short odds an open-casket funeral would be ruled out at an early juncture. Poor bugger. Some farm worker probably, paying a high price for a fly fag in the vicinity of several drums of agricultural chemicals that would have about three different Brussels departments in collective apoplexy when they found out.

  He felt a squelching sensation underfoot and stopped dead, looking down reluctantly as the cows’ lethargic lowing rang in his ears like a taunt. Examining his spattered boot, he observed that the colour, texture and consistency were not what he had been expecting. Admittedly, being from the big city, he was no connoisseur of cowshit, but even a dilettante could detect that this was something even less pleasant than a freshly laid steamer. Besides, it wasn’t the first time he’d found himself standing in a puddle of blood amidst a scene of carnage and devastation. The difference today was that nobody was paying him for it. He looked again at the severed arm, then back down at the puréed gore. Never mind an open casket, they’d be burying this guy in a jug.

  McGregor extricated himself from the puddle, the slightest wave of queasiness rippling through him despite decades of practised detachment. It was at such moments that he often worried about the possibility of it all catching up with him one day in some almighty, cumulative attack of squeamishness that would have him arcing boak for six yards before collapsing into a quivering, gibbering heap. Then again, he thought, switching the arm to under his left oxter, if this kind of thing didn’t bring it on, chances were it wasn’t going to happen.

  He noticed that the sliding door to the building opposite was open slightly, and decided to have a look inside. Maybe the puddle had left his jacket in there or something. Certainly they were going to have a swine of a time identifying him if he hadn’t, not unless the bugger had been fingerprinted. McGregor shouldered the door open further, noticing as he did so that four small holes had been drilled in the corrugated metal. They weren’t grouped or spaced in any uniform manner, so he was clueless as to what they were for. The thought of some teuch finding ways to relieve the rural monotony using a power tool was not one he wanted to dwell upon, so he ventured inside cautiously.

  It was gloomy in the shed, the sunlight prodding through in shafts and streaks where the metal panels didn’t quite meet. There were other, smaller beams, leading to further round holes in the walls at consistently random positions. McGregor scanned the area just inside the door until he found a forebodingly ancient-looking light switch, connected to a frayed and tape-bound length of cable, an arrangement straight out of a cautionary BBC public information film. He stayed his hand an inch from the switch, the ach-fuck’s-sake-it’ll-be-all-right impulse overruled by thoughts of the puddle saying much the same thing a few hours ago, back in his pre-puddle incarnation.

  McGregor looked around for something non-conductive on the floor, and spotted a splinter-edged length of wood. He bent down to pick it up, feeling his fingers sink into something wet on the underside. Shuddering at the combined effect of the sensation and the lingering thought of what lay outside, he picked up the piece of wood, liquid running off the back of it as he did so. It was flimsy, packing-case stuff. He turned it around so that he was holding a dry
section, and jabbed it at the switch, which flipped downwards with a stiff click. Nothing happened. He threw the piece of wood away in disgust, skelfs embedding themselves in his flesh as the departing ragged edge scraped along his palm. The stick clattered against the sliding door and landed outside, where the sunlight revealed its liquid coating to be an unmistakable shade of dark red. McGregor walked back to the doorway and examined his hand. It too was streaked with blood.

  ‘Jesus fuck,’ he muttered. ‘Whit’s the score here?’

  He shouldered the sliding door and pushed it open as far as it would go. Sunlight invaded impatiently. It picked out several packing crates lying discarded on the ground, straw and smashed lids spilling over the sides. McGregor walked towards them, bending over to have a closer look. He remembered the skelfs currently wheedling their way ever-deeper into his right palm, and prodded carefully at the straw and shards to see whether any clue remained as to the crates’ former contents. There was nothing. Beside the last one, however, there was another very small, dark, damp patch. He knelt down to examine it, putting the arm down on the floor so that he could lift the crate to one side. As he’d suspected, there was a larger reservoir of the red stuff hidden beneath, dripping off the underside of the container as soon as he lifted it.

  McGregor grimaced and dropped the crate back down, unavoidably splashing himself as he did so. He felt the blood spray his face and neck from below, and spat as he recognised a hint of the taste on his lips.

  ‘God ’michty. Eurgh.’

  Another thing he recognised was the sight of an initial simple explanation heading speedily for the hills. By the time he reached for the arm again and found a shell-case glinting nearby, it had disappeared over the horizon, never to return.

  From the sober, detached perspective of the Rosstown interview room, it was easier to see how his subsequent actions might have inadvertently courted maybe the merest possibility of misinterpretation. At the time he’d been more concerned with the immediate necessity to inform the authorities of his discoveries and his suspicions, now that he wasn’t the authorities himself anymore. He had stuck the shell-case in his pocket, lifted the arm once again, and headed purposefully for the main road, which was the best part of a mile from the farm down a crater-pocked track. Emerging sweaty and pink-faced from the hedge-shielded junction, he had attempted to flag down an approaching minicab, realising only as he saw the horror in the driver’s eyes that he was waving at the vehicle with the dismembered limb. The minicab swerved almost off the road as the driver attempted to give him as wide a berth as possible, before righting itself with a screech of its tyres and accelerating insanely away.

  About two hundred yards further on, a Renault with foreign plates came hurtling round the bend and into view. It was upon him before he reacted to hide the extra arm, but he could appreciate in retrospect that even without it, he wasn’t looking much like anyone’s idea of a safe hitchhiker. The Renault swerved much as the minicab had, except that it over-compensated in righting itself and ran off the road, bouncing violently along the clumpy grass for a few dozen yards before coming to an abrupt stop against the tall, unkempt hedge. McGregor bounded wheezily towards it, intending to check that both of the occupants were all right. As he approached, he saw the driver emerge and clamber across the bonnet to reach the passenger-side door, yanking it open and practically dragging his female companion from within. Once safely extricated, the pair began running along the road, looking back every few paces at the bloody and terrifying figure who was now bearing down on their forsaken car, shouting after them as they fled.

  ‘Aw, for Christ’s sake,’ he grunted, giving up the pursuit and panting heavily as he watched them hare off, the female figure frantically punching at a mobile telephone as she ran. McGregor turned around in disgust, then allowed himself a smile as he noticed a plume of exhaust-smoke spiralling wispily from the rear of the car. He walked slowly towards the Renault, wiping sweat, grime and gore from his brow with his left sleeve. Placing the arm on top of the car’s roof, he climbed into the driver’s seat and checked out the controls. It was an automatic, which explained why it hadn’t stalled, but with no pressure on the footbrake since the driver scarpered, it had been determinedly nosing its way deeper into the hedge.

  McGregor stuck it into reverse and pressed an ever-heavier foot on the accelerator. The car moved back less than a foot before one of the rear wheels sank into a rut and began burrowing itself into the sod. He put the gearstick into forward again and turned the steering wheel hard away from the hedge, but the front remained both obstructed and ensnared by the robust and unruly privet.

  It was around about this point that the local police were formulating a response to the distressed and resultantly garbled messages they’d been receiving in the previous few minutes. The first had been via radio from a rabid-sounding cabbie, and they’d been inclined to disregard it until it was followed shortly by a 999 mobile call from a near-hysterical French tourist. Neither report sounded particularly lucid or even entirely comprehensible, but both were undeniably terrified, and referred consistently to the presence of a blood-covered madman on the road to Kilbokie.

  The cabbie had come on literally screaming murder, his static-crackled stream of consciousness only randomly throwing up nuggets of coherent speech. ‘He’s cut up the body!’ he kept babbling. ‘He’s kill’t them an’ he’s chopped them up!’

  The tourist’s already feeble English was not assisted by her panic-stricken condition, but she nonetheless managed to communicate a sufficiently corroborative story for the police to take the cabbie’s report seriously. However, even more alarmingly, she added that ‘the man … ’e ’ad … how you say? An arm.’

  ‘He was armed?’

  ‘Yes, ’e ’ad an arm.’

  ‘Oh Jesus Christ. Sarge! Sarge! …’

  Meanwhile McGregor had unfortunately succeeded in jamming one of the Renault’s rear wheels into the rut, but upon close examination reckoned it just needed a wee bit of rocking for the thing to pull free and haul the car back on to the tarmac. However, he couldn’t drive it and rock the back-end at the same time. This was definitely a two-man job.

  Hope teased him for a second as a delivery van came by and drew to a stop alongside. The bloke even went as far as opening his door before he clocked the severed arm lying on top of the car and the general condition of the man at the wheel.

  More screeching tyres.

  However, it did give McGregor an idea. He didn’t really need a second man, just something to keep pressure on the accelerator while he applied his shoulder at the rear of the left flank. He put the Renault into reverse once more and reached for the roof.

  ‘Right,’ he muttered darkly. ‘Aboot time you gave me a hand.’

  His theory worked well enough in practice, the car dislodging itself suddenly after half-a-dozen spirited heaves, but illustrated a limitation around the area of slowing down again. He enjoyed the most fleeting moment of satisfaction at feeling the vehicle overcome the rut and move clear, before having to start tearing after the thing as it began lurching backwards with the familiar bronchitic whine of rapid reverse acceleration.

  McGregor caught up with it and yanked at the handle as the Renault bobbled along, two wheels on Tarmac, two on grass. The door swung suddenly open as the rear grass-side wheel encountered a particularly unforgiving pot-hole. McGregor shimmied to avoid it, but it had been at least two decades since his last such manouevre, probably on Leith Links, and there was more body to swerve these days. The door caught him a glancing blow, enough to send him sprawling into the grass as the Renault, driver’s door a-flap, trundled slowly back off the road on the other side and came to rest against a fencepost with a gentle bump. From his prostrate perspective he could see the dislodged arm hanging out of the car, hand-first, like there was an unconscious motorist still attached.

  ‘Sufferin’ God.’

  With a diminishing sense of determination, McGregor picked himself up once again an
d walked across to assess the latest developments. He climbed clumsily into the driver’s seat and tossed the arm into the passenger-side footwell.

  ‘Some fuckin’ driver you were,’ he told it, sticking the car into forward one more time. The Renault crawled labouringly up the grassy incline and was finally on the open road again. He executed a dozen-point turn on the narrow tarmac and headed off in the direction of Rosstown.

  It was a single-track road with passing-places, so he was relieved, if a little surprised, not to meet any traffic coming in the opposite direction. Still, it wasn’t exactly Princes Street round here, so presumably it wasn’t that much out of the ordinary. As he passed a sign denoting that he was two miles from town, the spell ended and he at last encountered another vehicle. Less comfortingly, it was a helicopter, swooping down from nowhere and dogging him less than ten yards to his left, flying about thirty feet above the fields. He craned his neck to look upwards out of the window, snatching glances back at the road to ensure that he didn’t lose control. It looked like a police bird, with a bloke staring back down at him through binoculars, talking into a hand-mike as he did so.

  McGregor reached down automatically for a radio handset, the years of habit and conditioning prompting a now-redundant action. His outstretched fingers found only an open ashtray with a moist, half-sooked boiled sweetie in it. There was a bend approaching. He slowed the car a little and had another gander up at the chopper before he hit the turn. The man with the mike was still doing his Peter O’Sullivan, by the looks of it. When McGregor fixed his eyes back upon the road, it was just in time to see two police cars slewing across his path in front of the junction he was nearing at – according to the speedo – Christ! Ninety! There seemed no time to brake, and he’d kill himself and both the polis drivers if he hit them head-to-side like that. He had no option but to swerve to his left and aim for the hedge.